David Hockney

It reminds us of this depressed penguin from Werner Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World”. [Youtube]

Fergus McCaffrey has announced that he’s opening a second gallery location on the island of St. Barthélemy this November. The gallery notes that the island has held an artist colony since the sixties, hosting artists like Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, and Francesco Clemente. In that tradition McCaffrey had already co-established an artist residency and gallery there from 2005-2008. The next logical step, we think, would be to fly some writers down for the tour. [Our inboxes]

Strange. The lede to this article makes artist David Hockney sounds like a grumpy old man complaining that art has become “less” through conceptual art, as it “gave up on images.” Watch the 4-minute video, though, and he sounds a lot cheerier and doesn’t talk so much about conceptual art. [BBC]

Laure Provost on art and life: “I know I’m never going to fully grasp life in my art. It’s never as good as having the sun on your face. Even if you film someone with the sun on their face it feels as if you’ve lost something. ” [Frieze, behind the paywall]

Prepare to die inside when reading “Blouin Lifestyle Picks” on ArtInfo. “Picks” include Burmese rubies, Colombian emeralds, and a diamond ring with “baguette-cut diamond shoulders” (whatever that means). Maybe their readership is made up of lords, ladies, and the richest Kardashians?[ArtInfo]

In Hong Kong, thousands of students are occupying the streets in a very orderly fashion. They are calling for democratic reforms by sitting outside, cleaning up after themselves, recycling, and doing their homework in public. Amazing. [The Independent]

And of course the city’s art fairs will go on in the face of protests, reports Kelly Crow. [Twitter]

Christopher Wool at the Guggenheim gets a lukewarm review from Roberta Smith. Yawn. Christopher Wool. [The New York Times]

Four shows to see in Philadelphia. The Barnes, Kaws @PAFA, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Mario Ybarra, and The Fabric Workshop and Museum. [Hyperallergic]

All’s been quiet on the Jori Finkel front. Months after the Los Angeles Times laid off Finkel, the publication’s last reporter dedicated to the visual arts, it appears she’s started covering the California museum beat for The New York Times. This week, she discusses the de Young Museum’s new VIP rate for the upcoming Hockney exhibition. [The New York Times]

“Right now, Whiteread is the most famous artist in Britain.” [Frieze Magazine]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has renegotiated its building’s lease with the city of New York, with one potentially divisive amendment: the museum now has the ability to change their admission rates without the city’s approval. [In the Air]

Second year Central St. Martin’s art student Clayton Pettet is giving up his anal virginity on stage for an art exhibition. “The key thing about performance art is that it should only be performed once, and this is the ultimate once-in-a-lifetime performance,” he told reporters. Not sure who told him that performance is a one-time gig. [Gawker]

New York art types with a penchant for film have a lot on their plate this weekend with the launch of the New York Film Festival. There’s Tom Hanks fighting pirates in the premier of Captain Phillips if you want the mainstream. There’s James Franco’s latest bizarre literary adaptation “Child of God,” if you want what Manohla Dargis refers to as “a scene of on-screen defecation that’s so aggressively up close and personal that it approaches 3-D.” Yes, pirates and poop are very exciting. But those movies will be released across the nation, so it’ll be easy to check them out. This is a listing of the smaller and better offerings that don’t come around everyday.

The installation of Matthew Day Jackson's 'Burghers of Calais' at Swiss Gallery Hauser & Wirth

My favorite quote in The Wall Street Journal’s article on mega-sized galleries and mega-sized art projects is Hauser & Wirth’s Director Mark Payot on the gallery’s decision to give away free coffee on the weekends. “We don’t need to sell coffee.” The other bit of news: Matthew Day Jackson is gonna open a new nonprofit gallery called Bunker 259. Can. Not. Wait. [Hauser & Wirth]

Certified copy or authenticated original? A Caravaggio painting of two boys playing cards was sold by Sotheby’s in 2006 for 42,000. The auction house is now being sued by a collector who claims it’s a Caravaggio–and worth 10 million. [Insurance Journal]

Director Marc Glimcher says Pace is just as friendly and approachable as when it began. “It’s really the same family it always was—just a bit bigger.” [ArtInfo]

Detroit has been delivered its new hero. A Robocop statue whose birth can be traced to a suggestion tweeted to Mayor Bing in 2011 has finally arrived to its hometown and is projected to be unveiled by August of next year. “Yeah, it’s silly,” Walley admits. “But is there no place for 10 feet of silliness within 139 square miles of our expansive city?” [Mother Jones]

Alexander Augustus’ installation “A Dangerous Fire” at London’s Sommerset House used crowdsourced selfies to create a digitized portrait of the UK’s young unemployed. [Frieze]

David Hockney’s assistant went on drink and drugs binge then jumped off balcony before killing himself by drinking concentrated sulphuric acid at artist’s home. That’s just the headline. [Daily Mail]

American income equality is less now in absolute terms now than it was in 1774. Lindert and Williamson write, “Among all American households, slaves included, the richest 1 percent had only 7.1 percent of total income . . . . [In] the United States today . . . almost 20 percent of total income accrues to the top 1 percent.” [The Berkley Blog via: Shane Ferro]

With Independence Day on the horizon, it’s no surprise that every New York gallery and museum seems to be opening a new show, hosting a workshop, or putting on an art event. Next week, the art world retreats to the Hamptons. A focus on the collective seems to be the theme of choice this summer, be it collective practice at Klaus Von Nichtssagend, collective movement at the EFA, or simply an art collective at the Brooklyn Museum.

A will to change is in the air, but it’s against a backdrop of the same-old. At the New Museum, Karen Finley’s live sext paintings challenge an institutional denial of boundary-pushing work, while the Whitney has more shows of Hopper and Hockney. Klaus Biensenbach and The Jogging talk about rising waters (in their own ways), at Hyperallergic and Still House respectively. Plus, a group show of some of art’s most vocal activists addresses failure.

#ArtsTech announces the #ArtsTech Unconference, to be held on April 27th. It’s not a typical conference: anyone can submit ideas for panels, workshops, and talks. Unheard of ideas by underdogs, we understand, would be more than welcome. And if your idea becomes a Featured Session, you’ll get free passes to the event. Woo! [ArtsTech]

Massimiliano Gioni talks to ArtInfo UK about curating the Venice Biennale. Apparently, outsider artists will be shown alongside established artists. Gioni cites Roberta Smith as an influence, an awful large feather for any critic’s hat. [ArtInfo]

Hyperallergic Editor-In-Chief Hrag Vartanian said he likes invisible history Danh Vo over Twitter last night. We disagree about the merit of this work, at least in respect to We The People. Here’s why. [Art F City]

Time Out’s Chicago edition will cease print publication. Staffers were told that print publication would cease beginning in April and most of the company’s 60 employees will lose their jobs. [Time Out Chicago]

AFC friend Edward Champion (Ed Rants), will walk 3,000 miles from Brooklyn to San Francisco, writing dispatches as he goes. The project will culminate in an oral history radio narrative. It’s gonna take him 6 months, so he’s fundraising for the project. Help him out. I think this is going to be a great project. [indigogo]

We missed Justin Lieberman’s talk at Paper Monument last night and are now filled with feelings of self-loathing for doing so. Read his account of the best art assignment ever. [Paper Monument]

“Pie is the food of the heroic”. A 1902 article linking pie and national success from the Times. [Lawyers, Guns and Money]

The slide shows for Carsten Höller’s exhibition, “Experience” at The New Museum are out. The best come from Gothamist [disclaimer, I’m in a few of those shots], and WNYC’s Carolina Miranda. [Gothamist] [WNYC]

I love this. From the #OWS Arts and Culture working group, Occupy Museums announces BYOM [Bring Your Own Manifesto] at MoMA tomorrow. They will be joined the Sotheby’s Art Handlers in their protest. [Paddy Johnson]

“I'm perfectly willing to take [the naysayers] on” David Hockney tells the Globe and Mail, in a profile largely focusing on his ipad and iphone drawings currently on display at the ROM. Me first! [Globe and Mail]

More than half the work at Rashaad Newsome’s show at Marlborough Gallery has already sold. I’d ask if this is an indication of the artist’s status as a rising star, but it’s hard to imagine anything like that coming out of Marlborough. [NYTimes]

David Hockney's Fresh Flowers exhibition has been touring Europe in advance of its only Canadian stop, at the ROM's Institute for Contemporary Culture, and garnering a lot of hype along the lines of “74-year-old visionary explores cool new medium!” The show consists of hundreds of flower-themed still lifes done exclusively on iPads and iPhones. (Hockney added his own spin, saying that working with the Apple devices allows him to paint without the “mess”—which sounds as though he's promoting a cleaning product.)